Unsung stars of silver screen
taxis for Checker Taxi. Getting an idea where the name came from?
While it had built a number of cars for the taxi trade, the real icon appeared in 1956, after New York changed its taxi regulations in 1954, effectively requiring the company to build an entirely new cab. By 1958 quad headlights were made legal in the US and the Checker’s iconic look was set until 1982, when it ended production.
Rows of Checkers jostling for position on crowded New Yorks streets is a default image for movies set there during the Checker’s dominant reign, with it gradually being edged off the silver screen by the Crown Vic.
Unlike the Ford, the Checker did have a number of starring roles in movies and TV shows, with the ‘civilian’ version (the Checker Marathon) standing in for local cars in many US shows supposedly set in Eastern Europe, starring roles in the 1983 comedy movie DC Cab and the Martin Scorsese masterpiece Taxi Driver, as well as being the centrepiece of the longrunning sitcom Taxi.
Ford Falcon
Yes, that one. The one built by the Aussies that was basically the local equivalent of the Checker and Crown Vic. The default taxi. The background furniture of the local motoring scene.
The Falcon has had a quietly successful career in Hollywood movies since it first shot to fame as a hero car in the Mad Max series of films. But it’s not necessarily the very cool early coupes and V8s we are talking about here; the basic taxi-spec inline six from the XD through to the BA has had an impressive career in movies and television too.
Of course, both in Australian and New Zealand productions it is often the default police car or taxi, so notches up quite a few appearances in local and locally shot movies and TV shows.
But it has had glimpses of international fame as well, most notably thanks to Tom Cruise.
Large parts of Cruise’s film Mission: Impossible II were set in Sydney and much of the filming took place locally, meaning that the Falcon gets a surprising amount of screen time (along with a few other notable Aussie machines). This one isn’t so important for its many background appearances (although it has had many of those), but more for a handful of supremely good but largely unsung leading roles.
The 406 is the star of the first three of Luc Besson’s extremely successful Taxi franchise of action/comedy movies. The 406 is always shown on the movie posters in the air; that’s what it does during the movies as well.
Kitted out with a remarkable array of hidden features (like race tyres, spoilers, splitters and rotating number plates) the 406 is definitely the star of the first three movies (it was replaced by a 407 in the latest instalment), but they are largely unknown outside of France, so that leaves the 406’s biggest role internationally to be its appearance in the brilliant 1998 John Frankenheimer thriller Ronin. The biggest, baddest Mercedes of its time has possibly the most unsung movie appearance of all time – its starring role in the classic French film C’e´tait un Rendezvous ( It Was a Date) by Claude Lelouch.
Essentially eight minutes of the most outlandish hoonery committed to film at the time of its release in 1976, it ostensibly features director Lelouch thrashing his Ferrari 275 GTB at full speed through the streets of Paris early one morning.
Except, despite the engine soundtrack being that of the Ferrari, and the car featuring on the film’s poster, this wasn’t exactly the case.
Nope, the actual car Lelouch mounted his massive camera on the nose of was his thoroughly massive Mercedes-Benz 450 SEL 6.9, the full-size luxury sedan that Mercedes had taken the wonderful step of shoehorning a 213kW/549Nm 6.9-litre engine into.